Whose Freedom? | George Lakoff | Talks at Google

All right.

Well, it's my pleasure to introduce Professor George Lakoff. Dr. Lakoff is a professor of linguistics at UC Berkeley and also senior fellow at the Rockridge Institute. Professor Lakoff was one of the founders of generative semantics in the 1960s, but abandoned the theory because of syntactic amalgams such as, you know how much I.

Had to look for this.

Okay, Homer drank. I don't remember how many beers at the party. Lakoff concluded that there was no single deep structure for which the sentence could be derived. Neither generative nor interpretive semantics were therefore viable. He turned his attention to defining a school of linguistics that greatly contrasts with the position that there is an independent language faculty in the mind brain. Cognitive linguistics is therefore incompatible with generative grammars of the 60s and 70s and their descendants. He's gone on to explore ways in which the world we live in influences language and, and how language may well mold cognition. He is perhaps best known for his book Don't Think of an Elephant. He's here today to discuss his most recent title, whose the Battle over America's Most Important Idea. Oh, and by the way, Maximiliano Miranda, in his recent dissertation entitled Derivation and Representation of Syntactic amalgams, this is 2004, has revisited and as he puts it, the puzzling phenomenon first discovered and reported, described and analyzed by Lakoff in his seminal paper of 1974. Whether one agrees with Lakoff's conclusions or not, it is important to note that he has provided rich insights that will be puzzled over for decades to come. Please welcome George Lakoff.

Thank you for coming and it's nice to be back at Google. I was here a couple of years ago and I wanted to say my understanding of what Google is. My understanding is that Google is the major force in the world for the democratization of information. And so I am. That's why I'm proud to be here. My own work has been dedicated to the democratization of knowledge. What I've tried to do in everything I've done is to write clearly and explain exactly what's going on and what the evidence for it is. And that's what's something that has carried me through for a long time. And the Rockridge Institute is an attempt to expand the democratization of knowledge to the democratization of knowledge about politics. Our job at Rockridge is to understand how messages are framed in politics, what the values behind political ideas are, what are political ideas. Ideology is how these things show up in language. And the reason why you need somebody who does cognitive science and Linguistics to do this is the following. One of the first things that was learned in cognitive science is that virtually all of our thought is unconscious, not conscious. It's about 98% unconscious. Moreover, it's been learned recently, in the last decade or so, that emotion is necessary for reason. It doesn't interfere with reason. It's the reverse. It's necessary for reason. And we now have some very good idea about how that works in terms of the cognitive unconscious. What we've been doing for the past 30 years is discovering methods to find out exactly what it looks like and how it works. And in the past 15 to 20 years, we've been taking work in neuroscience and neurocomputation and trying to answer the question, how is it possible for a physical brain to actually think and have language? And we've actually made a lot of progress on that, remarkably enough, at icsi, at the International Computer Science Institute at Berkeley, one of whose graduates is here in this room working with you guys. The a number of important things have been learned. First, when this country was founded, it was founded on ideas from the Enlightenment. And that was that there was a thing supposed to be a thing called universal rationality, universal reason. It's supposed to work like formal logic. It was supposed to be conscious, it was supposed to be non emotional and disembodied. This comes from Descartes. And it turns out that on that basis there was a political consequence of this. That is what defined human beings was their ability to reason. Therefore they didn't need to have to be governed by other people. We didn't need to have kings and popes and so on telling us what to do and how to think, we could govern ourselves. And since we use reason to, you know, to carry out our own interests and to find out, to carry out our purposes. So the best government was supposed to be one where everybody was equal because we're all equally rational and which served the interests of everybody. And that was the idea behind this country. That's why we have a democracy and that's why we are concerned with everybody's interests. A terrific idea. One problem with it, however, was the view of the mind. It was completely wrong. Most thought is not conscious. Logic is not the way people usually think. They think in terms of frames and metaphors and prototypes and other kinds of mechanisms that we've discovered. As I said, thought is emotional and it's very much embodied. That is the way the brain and body is structured influences the very concepts that we have. Now, one of the places where this happens is in metaphorical thought. I didn't understand many years ago that metaphor was interesting. It was supposed to be, according to Aristotle, just surface language of a certain special poetic kind. It turns out that virtually every thought you have uses metaphor of some sort of. And these metaphors arise unconsciously by the time you're six or seven years old, maybe earlier. So, for example, more is up and less is down, you know, prices rise and fall. That's a metaphor you all have. And around the world everybody has this. You have notions like a purpose is a destination, it's a goal you're trying to reach, something can be standing in the way, etc. Right? Perfectly natural. It's a metaphor. How many of these do you have? Thousands. You didn't even know you acquired them. How did you get them? We figured out how. And it's a very interesting thing. Take more is up. Why you pour more water in the glass, the level goes up. Every day of your life. You pile more stuff on your desk, the level goes up. When that happens, two parts of your brain are activated and they're in different places for verticality and quantity. When they're activated regularly, you get spreading activation through your brain. And eventually, if this is regularly activated every day, you get connections made and a circuit formed between them. And the circuit is very simple to form a metaphor. That circuit is a metaphor. And we've studied what the circuit has to look like and how easy it is to form and so on. And whenever this happens, you're going to learn metaphors like emotion. Like, for example, affection is warmth, he's a warm person, he's a cold person, and so on. Okay? Why parents hold you as a child. Affection correlates with warmth. And regularly both are activated together. You learn the metaphor and you learn them by hundreds and thousands. And we've analyzed them, we know a lot about what they look like. It turns out that this way of thinking shows up in politics all over the place. The other part that shows up is what is called frame, semantics, Frame, Very simple idea. Here's a bottle, okay? You understand this bottle as a container that you can put things into and take out of. You can pick it up, take a drink like this. That's about what you know about a bottle. It's made of certain things, glass, plastic, etc. That's about it. But it has rolls, it's a container, it has an inside, it has an opening and so on. There are contents to it, okay? Very simple minded thing. That's a frame. There are thousands, tens of thousands of these in your brain, you've learned vast numbers of them and they show up in politics. And the reason for that is every word is defined with respect to some sort of frame. Here's bottle. Very simple kind of cases, but in politics it gets much more interesting. Take war. What is the frame for war? War has armies that fight each other. They fight each other over territory. In a war, typically one side wins, the other side surrenders. There may be a peace treaty, etc. That's your normal frame for war. There are soldiers, there's destruction, there's much more than that. Very complicated things. There's a number of scenarios carried out by war. There are invasions. You all know this, but that is part of your fame for war. You get war on terror and you're in metaphorical territory. Terror is not another army. Terror is a state of mind. It's a metaphor. And, and it takes this frame and it takes things out of the literal war. The war on terror can't be a literal war. You can't sign a peace treaty, it's never over, et cetera. What it does is what it did when it was proposed. And by the way, Colin Powell argued in the administration against using the military at all in this and against calling it a war. He advised calling it a crime. What it does is give the President war powers. And that was one of the reasons it was used. And it allows you to declare real wars. And that's what has happened. This is something that most people don't necessarily see. People hear war on terror, war on terror. Now, how do you. What happens when it's repeated? When it's repeated, you get the metaphor of war. You get this idea of terror, that there's some enemy who's terrorists, et cetera, who you have to fight and that you can defeat. There could be victory, supposedly, and so on. And what happens is it's repeated over and over until it becomes part of your brain. Your synapses change through repetition. And so whenever you hear something like war on terror or tax relief over and over and over, you get a new understanding of something that you didn't have before. And it becomes physically part of your brain. It's a physical change. Very important, because what has happened through the conservative message machine, and I don't know if you know about this, there are about, you know, a large number of think tanks set up by conservatives since the early 1970s. They spent over $4 billion doing it, about 400 million a year just on think tanks and then getting messages out. A large message Machine, not counting all the radio and TV stations owned, just a message machine that repeats all these things over and over. And eventually you just hear them and they become part of your brain. They become part of the normal way you think. What we do at Rockridge is studying how this works. And we studied it, we studied it in considerable detail, and we found a number of very interesting things. In a book about 10 years ago I wrote called Moral Politics, I was interested in the question of how liberals and conservatives differed in the way they thought. You turn on one of these TV shows where people argue past each other, no contact at all, and you say, well, what is going on? Why is that the case? I asked myself a problem. In 1994, I read the Contract with America and I said, why is it that the same people who are against abortion are for owning guns? What do they have to do with each other? Why are they for the flat tax? What does that have to do with owning guns or abortion? Why are they against environmental regulations? What does that have to do with all the other cases? Why are they for tort reform? Well, how does this fit together? I had no idea. And then I said, well, I have the opposite views on all of these. How do mind fit together? And I couldn't answer the question. I had no idea. Eventually I figured it out because I asked about family values and how they worked and realized that we had a metaphor, that the nation is a family, but it's not. You know, we have founding fathers. Every seven year old knows that George Washington is the father of his country. Nobody says why? What father? That's not daddy. They know it's a metaphor and they get it. There's even around the world, Mother India, Mother Russia, the Fatherland. Very common. Now the way this actually works is much more technically interesting. And let me take a couple of minutes to talk about it because it tells you a lot about politics. What is your first experience with governance? It's in your family. So what you have is a correlation between an experience with being governed and a family. And you get a metaphor over and over of a governing institution is a family. And the primary governing institution we know about is the nation as a special case. But we have lots of other things. Google could be seen as a family, a baseball team can be seen as a family, et cetera. Any kind of governing institution can be understood by this metaphor, which arises naturally. Now it turns out, what kind of families do we have? And what we found was that there are two basic kind of families that give rise to an understanding of Politics in this country, what I'll call a strict father family and a nurturing parent family. The strict father family is based on a view of morality that also arises spontaneously. That morality is obedience to some legitimate authority. And another view that morality is care for the nurtured family. And then there are other metaphors that accrue to these. And they accrue to them because brains are best fit mechanisms. That is, they're cases where ideas fit together. So you have the idea of morality as strength, you know, as opposed to a moral weakling and so on. You have the idea of morality as a disease. So immorality can be a contagion that can spread. These various things accrue to these two different views. Morality as care and morality as obedience. And what you get are two views of what is right and wrong in the family. Let me tell you what those views are very briefly. In a strict father family, you need a strict father because there is evil in the world that he's got to protect the family from. He's got to support the family in competitions, and mommy can't do this. It's a gendered family. Two kids are born bad in the sense that they, you know, just, you know, they're just born bad. And therefore they have to be taught right from wrong. They just want to do what they want to do. So that is a very important kind of thing. So they're born bad, and he, the father, has to teach them right from wrong. He knows what's good and he knows what's bad. He can teach them right from wrong. Okay? And the only way to teach them right from wrong is punishment. You have to punish them for doing every time they do wrong. And then they learn to do right by trying to avoid the punishment. They get internal discipline. And if they get that discipline, then they can go out into the world in the market and succeed. They can be disciplined and, you know, prosper in the world. And if they're not prosperous, there's a logic that says they if they're not prosperous, they're not disciplined enough. If they're not disciplined, they can't be moral. Therefore, what they deserve, their poverty. This applies directly to politics. If you take a nurturant parent model, what you have is the job of the parent is to nurture the child and to raise the child to be nurturers of others. And nurturance involves two things. Empathy, caring, and responsibility for the child. Now, from that you have a view of the family. What is the family there to do? Among other things, it's supposed to protect the child and to empower it. Empower it, meaning to be able to fulfill its life. You want to give them an education, you want them to be healthy, you want them to be free and treated fairly and so on. And you get from these two ideas of protection, and you get protection, you get environmental protection and worker protection and so on. You get progressive politics directly out of that. The way this works technically is that this view of the family is mapped onto a. And a governing institution where the details of the family are factored out. That is, in the neural theory of metaphor, what happens is you get these two cases that are active, but something that any inferences about the family come along if they're consistent. If they're not consistent, they're factored out. So you don't choose your parents, but in government, you might choose your government. Right? Those can be factored out. So it's not the literal family that is carried on there. It's certain views of the family that structure politics. Now, when you understand this, you can see that all kinds of institutions are understood in terms of these two modes of thought, strictness and nurturance. And these two modes of thought actually are there in all of us. As if you're brought up in this country culture, you know, both of them. And so, for example, you may be nurturing in every part of your life. If you can walk into an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie and understand it, then you have a strict father view. You know, you didn't walk out. People don't walk out of there saying, what was that about? Right. If you understand it, you have that view of the world, even if it's passive. Now, a lot of people have this. Have both views in. In different parts of their lives. So there are people who have strict father views about, let's say, economics, but nurturing views about social issues or the reverse. You know, there are all kinds of possible combinations of these things, and these are what we call biconceptuals. In fact, a lot of people are biconceptual. That is, they have strict views on one area and nurturing views on another. And these are two different modes of reasoning, two different modes of thought. So let's take a look at what this tells us. Take the economy. Take the notion of the market. Whenever you hear something like let the market decide, a linguist's ears perks up and says, ah, personification. The market is a strict father. That is, the market is rewarding discipline and punishing, lack of discipline, of fiscal discipline. And this Is something that is supposed to be good. Now, from a conservative point of view, conservatism, a conservative point of view is an application of a strict father view of the world to a certain area. And there are conservative people who call themselves conservatives who don't just have strict father points of view to all areas. They're usually biconceptuals. We'll get to that in a minute. But what does it say about the market? It says that if you have this view of the market, what does government do? Government interferes with it. How does government interfere? It interferes in four ways. One, regulation. Regulation can take away profit. Two, taxation. Taxation can take away profits and therefore take away incentives. Three, workers rights and pensions and things of that sort that can take away profits. And four, lawsuits that can take away profits. So those are the four things that conservatives want to stop government from. Want to stop government from interfering with the market. From a progressive point of view, the market is a very different object. The market is there to help people. The market is there to create prosperity for everybody. The market is there to be fair in creating that prosperity. If you work for a living, you should be able to earn a living. I mean, that's what that's about. Now, what about government regulation from a progressive point of view? It's there for protection. It protects against unscrupulous corporations or, you know, you know, and careless corporations, negligent corporations, and so on. What else is. What else? What about taxation? Well, taxation has to do with the two functions of government, which are protection and empowerment. Protection is obvious, you know, in terms of the military and the police, but it's also there in Social Security. It's there in disaster relief. It's there in public health. All sorts of protection is there. But what about empowerment? That's usually not talked about. But the government builds highways, and you can go out on the highway and drive on it. But a business, a corporation can send out fleets of trucks on the highway more than you. A corporation uses that empowerment more. And that's true in every case. The Internet was originally, as you know, the arpanet built by the government. You know, we have that because of tax money. Satellites had to do with setting up NASA, which is there because of tax money. We have the banking system held up by the federal government. You can get a bank loan for your house, but a company can get a bank loan to buy another company. The banking system is there to hold up business. The court system empowers people in companies because it allows you to have contracts that aren't broken and to keep your copyrights, things of that sort. The stock market is held together by the sec so that you have an honest stock market. And then you have education, public education provides Google with people like you guys. Now, the idea here is that the empowerment part of government is usually not noticed by conservatives, but very much noticed by progressives because it's part of care. It's part of the part of government that has to do with care and responsibility. And it's very, very different with respect to the market. That is, this is not seen as a bad thing for markets, but as a good thing. Very different idea about taxation. When you think about taxation in terms of protection and empowerment, workers rights are seen as protections for workers. The court system, the idea to be able to sue companies that harm people is there to protect the population. So what you have is opposite views of the market that come out of strict father, nurture and parent views. Let's take other cases. Religion. There is a fundamentalist and progressive religion in this country. The difference what is your metaphor for God? Is God a strict father or a nurturing parent? Does God say, I give. Here are my commandments. Follow them, you go to heaven, if not you go to hell. Well, we'll give you a second chance now. Following, you go to heaven, if not you go to hell. Fundamentalist version, the progressive version said God is nurturing, God is there to have you lead a good life, to help people, to help the sick, to contribute to your communities, to help fight poverty, things of this sort. Very different view of God, totally different view. And you get these differences showing up politically as well. The foreign policy is totally different in each case. In a strict father case, it says, America is the legitimate authority in the world and people should listen to what we do, period. We should tell people what to do. And lesser nations should just follow. A progressive view of foreign policy says, we care about people, we're part of a world community, we work with other nations and we care about individual people. That is, you care about AIDS in Africa, you care about starvation, you care about global warming internationally, you care about whether there is slavery in the world. You care about women's education around the world. That is, those are parts of foreign policy. A very different approach to foreign policy if you take one view rather than the other. Now, what we have found, and this is true of education, you have very, very different notions of education coming out of this. But one of the things that is very disturbing that we find is that many progressives are adopting conservative views because they've Heard them so much that they've taken them as natural. And education is one such area. The conservative view of education says we're going to tell you what's right and you got to learn it. You know, you got to pass the test. You got it. We're going to teach you to the test and you're going to see if you reach these standards, see what the merit is. You're going to learn it, period. The other view of education says education is about development. You're going to develop as a person. You want to find out what people are good at, what they're curious about, what will fulfill them and educate them accordingly. Very different view of what education is, what testing is about, and what a school should be about. The first view says there's is punitive. It says, we're going to punish the students who aren't up to the task. We'll leave them behind. And not only that, we're going to punish the schools who don't do this. So it's a very punitive view. Now, along with that is a view of education in terms of production. You're going to produce students and you're going to give a product, and the product is an education. You have a consumer model. Either the students or their parents are buying this education. That is a model that comes out of a strict form. Whereas the other view says there's something very different. And education is not just a business that produces things. It's an attempt to develop people efficiently and teach them so that they can develop optimally in the way that is appropriate to them. Totally different views. But what you find as you start listening to, let's say, shows on NPR and liberal commentators, is that the production view of education begins to be adopted. You find it more and more in that view. Let's take another case. Energy independence. Originally, the idea of energy independence came out of the environmental movement and out of a nurturing part that said, hey, there's something wrong with using oil. And we're trying to get oil around the world. We've become enmeshed in wars because of oil. This is bad and it's bad for the environment. We should have alternative forms of energy. We should be independent of oil. This becomes energy independence, which says, ah, we have 200 years of coal. We don't have to get oil. We can have liquefied coal. We can have, you know, raised corn and get, you know, corn ethanol and so on. Which is the least efficient form of energy around. It turns out that, you know, energy independence is turned from the conservative point of view into something that is anti ecological. And this happens all the time. What we find is, because these are things have been repeated over and over that the conservative viewpoint on these things comes to be accepted by progressives more and more and comes to dominate the progress press. So you talk to reporters and they're not even aware of the problems they have. Let me give you an example. I've gotten a lot of calls about the term illegal immigration and we've written extensively at Rockridge about illegal immigration. And the very first thing I say is that if you look at that term, as soon as you accept that term, you accept the conservative view of it. Why? First of all, what it says is it focuses the problem on the people crossing the border rather than the people who employ them. Right? As if it's illegal to employ illegal immigrants. Then why not have, say the problem is illegal employment and illegal employers. The second thing it does is people then use the term illegals. There's, you know, Time magazine had a thing, illegals on the front page. Well, what does that say? It says these people across the border did not only do one illegal thing, they are inherently illegal. They're criminals. Right? We're bringing criminals into this country and we shouldn't have amnesty for these people. We shouldn't give them anything. They're bad. They're taking jobs away, they're doing criminal acts. We should, you know, not even allow them into our towns and a town in Texas that tried to keep undocumented workers from even renting apartments. So as soon as you say illegal immigration, what you have is that focus. Now there's another thing that's never mentioned in all of this, which is what do these folks do? What they do is all the work that allows three quarters of our population to have the lifestyles they have. They, you know, pick vegetables, they pick fruit, they allow you to have cheap food, they garden in people's houses, they take care of kids, they clean, they work on construction, they, you know, do all sorts of skilled work, they work in restaurants, they cook. In short, they are doing work that most other people don't want to do in, in this country for very little money, upholding the lifestyles of 3/4 in the country. And there is no gratitude. The idea of a gratitude deficit is not present. And the whole debate on so called illegal immigration should be about a debate about the gratitude deficit. That is, we have a country that requires an economy that requires cheap labor of a certain kind. One, should that labor continue to be cheap, should it be paid in some way or other. And secondly, given that, that it's necessary to uphold the lifestyles, the least you can do is have some gratitude, allow their kids to go to school, allow them to get decent housing, at least a driver's license. In short, the debate about so called illegal immigration is all done from the conservative perspective, even by progressives. As soon as they talk about illegal immigration, then they're in that frame, they're thinking in that way. What we do at Rockridge is try to take people out of those frames to say, where are the conservative frames that are really hiding truths? Our job is truth in framing. Our job is giving frames that reveal truths. Let me give you an example. Take the Iraq war. Now, given the warframe, the war in Iraq ended in May 2003. At that point, when Saddam Hussein's army was defeated, the statue came down, Bush got onto the aircraft carrier, said mission accomplished. He was right. One thing he was right about, the war was over and the occupation began. And what you have is an occupation is very different from a war and an occupation. You know, if you get resistance, there are people who are resisting an occupation. They don't want another army in their territory for many, many reasons. And occupation is extremely different. It's not great and wonderful to be an occupying force. And at that point in May 2003, Bush ceased to be a war president and became an occupation president. Not only that, when he ceased to be a war president, his war powers should have ended and Congress could have ended them. Congress could have said, hey, war is over, fine. We gave you these war powers back there. Now we're taking them back. You know, you're an occupation president, fine. And so I went to, I was invited to address the Progressive Caucus in Congress. I went there, mentioned this, and Lyn Woolsey said, oh, that's a good idea, let's write up a bill. Last September 7, the bill was written, 25 people signed on. They introduced it again in December, 50 people signed on two weeks ago. About a month ago, Hillary Clinton signed on to this idea that we should take away the war powers. A week after that, Ellen Toucher signed on to this idea. You know, that that is important because when you frame things for the truth, it takes a while, but people finally see truth. And it's important to do that because most of our reasoning is unconscious. And we just go along with what is being told to us on the TV and by the administration. And also even the reporters on the TV who are trying to be neutral accept that language because it's the Only language out there. Our job is to change that. Our job is to change that language. And let me give you one last case. Changing the language is not just changing words. It's not just coming up with a new slogan. It's deeper than that. So take the case of tax relief. The very first day Bush was in office, he put out a press release written by Karen Hughes that talked about tax relief. And then he said it over and over and over. Alright, what is the frame semantics of that? The frame semantics of relief says you have what you have some affliction, an afflicted party. Somebody's harmed by that affliction and if someone takes it away, he's a reliever and he's a hero. And if anybody tries to stop them, they want the affliction to continue. And that's. He's a bad guy. Okay? That's relief. You add tax and taxation becomes the affliction. You repeat it over and over again and taxation is an affliction. But in order for that to be the case, it has to be something that causes pain. Well, literally. It doesn't cause physical pain, it has to cause financial pain, metaphorical pain. In that way, in order for that to happen, you have to have a certain view of the economy. And it's the conservative view. If you have the progressive view of the economy that says that taxes are there, why they're there for protection and empowerment. And you can't live in a country like this without them, that they allow you to do all the things that you do, they allow businesses to exist and to function, then you can't have tax relief. It wouldn't make sense. And not only that, it would be like saying we want democracy relief or freedom relief. Okay, so what happens is that the words evoke an entire worldview, including an understanding of what the economy is like. And just having those words repeated over and over is not just about the words. It's about inculcating a worldview which has been inculcated for decades. For decades they've been talking about tax and spend, tax and spend. All of this stuff about taxation being taking money out of your pocket, not taxation empowering business. Right. Very important to understand the difference. And it's hard for people to think about taxation without thinking about it from a conservative point of view. And our job is to point that out to people. Our job is to make the unconscious conscious, to make what is called reflexive thought, like a reflex, the unconscious part reflective, so that you understand it. That's what we're trying to do so with that. One more thing. The book Whose Freedom, by the way, Thinking Points, is an overview of all of this stuff. The Rockridge Institute put this out in the fall. It can be read in a night. It's a very simplified version of all of the things I've just been talking about in detail. Whose freedom takes up a particular special case? In Bush's second inaugural address, Bush used the words freedom, free, and liberty 49 times in 20 minutes. I don't know how many of you heard it, but I then analyzed it as a linguist. And what happens is this. One of the things, you know, if you study linguistics is that there are things called contested concepts. A contested concept, freedom, democracy. Art is a good example, is a concept where there are certain cases where everybody agrees and then they diverge, where people necessarily disagree because they have different values that take the common core of the concept and extend it in different ways. So we may agree on certain kinds of works of art as being great works of art, but then we have different values about art, and they go in all sorts of directions. What happens with freedom is there's a central common core about what freedom is, and then the strict and nurturing modes of thought take them in totally opposite directions. In what Bush did in that talk, talk was start out with the common core. It sounded like for a while, like he was, you know, John F. Kennedy or Franklin Roosevelt or Martin Luther King. He kept saying these things that could have been said by any of those people. And then about halfway through, it shifted. And that shift was only the conservative view of freedom from then on in the talk. And so what I did was say, okay, what are these two views? And ex. Exactly how do they work in every area? We took freedom, free and liberty, and we used Google to search, and we got all sorts of examples. Who do you think uses liberty? The most conservative populists. Jerry Falwell's website. Liberty everywhere. Right. When was the last time you heard a progressive talk about liberty? It's all conservative populism. They've taken the word and applied them to a conservative view of the world. All of our most important words are contested in this way. Fairness, equality, opportunity, even accountability, even causation, vary depending upon these two modes of thought. And what we're trying to do at Rockridge is understand all the places where that word works and then put it out on our website and let the world find out about it. Thank you.

Actually, first, going to ask one that was submitted before this from our Kirkland office. Can you clarify how progressives and Conservatives frame responsibility differently. Are there subtleties or nuances in these differences that we should be aware of, particularly as they impact other frames or policies that are advocated by one side or the other?

Thank you for the question. Excellent, excellent question. For conservatives, responsibility is personal, individual responsibility. Think back to the strict father model, right? That is the strict father says, do this and you supposed to obey. It's your individual responsibility. And if you don't, you get punished. And one consequence of that is that causation is direct causation by one person. So you tend to get reasoning in terms of direct causation in those models. For a progressive, it's very different. Think again. In a nurturing parent family, when you're brought up, you're brought up in terms of what is cause called attachment. That is, you are loved and held and attached to your mother, your father, but also other relatives, people in your community, you know, people who take care of you. It is a global, systemic thing. And you learn to think in terms of systemic causation and in terms of social responsibility. And you can see this very clearly in the answer to the question, what are the causes of, of crime? The conservative answer is bad people lock them up. The progressive answer is to say, oh, let's think about this for a minute. What are the systemic causes of crime? You know, well, it could be poverty, it could be lack of adequate education, it could be being drawn up in a drug culture or a case where there is inadequate family life, etc. And you get totally different explanations in terms of what counts as responsibility. Similarly, you get totally different views of what is called accountability. So for a progressive, accountability of someone in public office. Is accountability to the public supposed to be accountable to the public? For a conservative, that's not true. Underlings are supposed to be be accountable to the guy at the top. So look at Abu Ghraib. Who is responsible? The person furthest down. It's not the commander in chief who's responsible, the Secretary of Defense or the people who set up the policy. It's the person people furthest down who are accountable. Gates comes into office as Secretary of Defense, they have the, they find out about the scandal at Walter Reed. He's going to say, I'm going to find out who's responsible and hold that person accountable below me. It's not like the President is accountable, he's the commander in chief. No, it's not like, oh, we're going to hold him accountable. Hardly. We're going to find some underling, totally different views of responsibility. Even causation and accountability.

In the.

In the open source world where many of us work, we talk about free software and there's an ongoing debate that's normally phrased as free as in speech versus free as in beer.

Free.

Free as in speech or free as in beer? Freedom.

Free as in speech or free as in beer?

Yes, freeloading, if you like. But recently I heard a formulation which is open source software is free as in kittens.

Free as in.

As in kittens.

As in.

As in free kittens.

Kittens. I see. Free kittens.

You have to nurture them.

Yeah. You have to take care of them.

I thought that was an interesting adaptation.

I love it. Thank you.

The other thing that struck me, you were talking about a strict father but a nurturing parent. Isn't that a nurturing mother? You seem to have framed it yourself to leave the female aspect out of it.

Well, one of the interesting things about America is that it became nurture and parent, probably in the Roosevelt administration. But in a way, it's been there for a long time. That is these values. If you go back in the history of this country and you read the early documents by the founding fathers, you see lots of nurturant views applied to government, not necessarily to the family, but to government from that perspective. And it has nothing to do with men or women or anything like that, because the family's been factored out via the metaphor that a governing institution is a family, where you map from the family the overall values and then you factor out the gender differences. But it turns out these days for progressives, parents are equally responsible in progressive families, in nurturing families. And so you have. You have fathers who are equally well expected to be nurturing.

I've had the.

Excuse me.

You've been speaking and writing about these important issues for many years. As you mentioned, it's been almost 10 years since moral politics.

Yes.

How the conservatives are using language and metaphor much more effectively than the progressives. Is the Democratic leadership. And are the leading Democrats taking your message to heart? Are the right people hearing and acting on this?

Well, I'm glad you asked that question today. Last week we put out at Rockridge a little paper called Congress is the Decider and pointing out that it is the role of Congress to declare war. And Congress is in charge of not just declaring war, but saying what the extent of the war should be, how troops should be deployed, how long they should be deployed. This is a congressional responsibility in the Constitution. And the president is just an executive. He carries it out. He's like vo. The Secretary, he does what's supposed to be done. He's an executive. And we put this out last week. Today, there's a new bill introduced by Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi that tells the President what to do. It says by January 1st, you're supposed to do this. By April 1st, you're supposed to do this. Here's the job of the president to do this. We tell him right now. It turns out that Nancy's chief of staff is a wonderful guy who saw this. Now, whether this went directly from us to them or came through other ideas, we don't know. But it looks like in that case, we've been listened to. In other cases, we've been listened to. When John Tester was running for the Senate last year, he was asked by the Billings, Montana Gazette what he was reading besides the Bible, and he said, don't think of an elephant. When we put out last summer this paper about occupation instead of war, it was picked up by Jim Webb, who used it in his Senate campaign. There are lots of cases where this has begun to happen where, for example, I started talking about values 10 years ago. By 2006, most of the Democratic candidates were talking about values. It took a while. They're slowly getting there. Most of them were not making as many framing mistakes, not using as many. And let me give you a very clear example of this. In the Democratic debate in New Hampshire a couple of weeks ago, they had all the nine candidates up there, and Wolf Blitzer was asking questions. And every question had a conservative frame. Every single question. And what they mostly did. Some people accepted the frame. Mostly they shifted frame. They had learned enough to shift frame. But finally Blitzer asked a question that made it harder for them to do it. He said, can you all raise your hands on this? You know, do you think English should be the official language of the United States? Hesitation for about two seconds. Barack Obama stood up, came forward and said, that is a question explicitly designed to divide us. Here is the issue as it should be. And then he said what it should be. Right. He didn't accept their frame. And not only that, he called them on it. First time I've ever seen this in a presidential debate. Something's happening.

Have another presubmitted question here. Yeah, your don't think of an elephant book seems to assume that voters are within only one frame at a time. Evaluate arguments only within that implicit frame. In my experience, people who argue and care about politics as well as other issues are where the real arguments are about framing. They're explicit Aware of several of the frames competing for legitimacy. And while they may only subscribe to one, they're not ignorant of their opponents frames isn't a little bit condescending to assume that only social scientists and not the participants in these debates go meta on the issues.

Reread that book. There's a whole section in there about biconceptualism, about, you know, if you're a progressive, how do you talk to a conservative? Well, conservatives have lots and lots of progressive views, and that's echoed in these books, especially in thinking points. What you find is, for example, we've done a study of what conservatives systematically have progressive views. And it's very interesting. Throughout the Midwest and the west, you have conservatives who love the land. They wouldn't talk about. They wouldn't say that they're in environmentalists. They never use the language, don't talk about sustainability. They want to go duck hunting. They want to be able to eat the fish they catch, which you can't do in 48 states right now. And you know, they. But they love the land. And Brian Schweitzer understood that and won the governorship on it. You know, now these are not people who wear the usual backpacks and where you have the nice camping gear and so on. They just love the land. They go out and take their SUVs into the countryside and go fishing. Okay, but very, very different. They don't use the language of environmentalism. There are people who call themselves conservatives all over the country who are progressive Christians who believe that really, you should feed the hungry, you should heal the sick, and that's what the country should be doing. Very, very different from conservative Christians. You have people who call themselves conservatives but are progressive business people, but don't think of themselves as such. They turn out to be honest. They treat their employees well, they would never harm the public. They're basically progressive business people, but they don't think of themselves as being that. There are people who call themselves conservatives but want to live in progressive communities. What's a progressive community? We have leaders who care about people and are responsible and where you have people who care about each other and are responsible to and for each other and who do community service all over this country. People who call themselves conservatives want to live in those communities. And this also happens in mega churches. The study of megachurches reveals that inside of the megachurch you have a community that's a nurturing community. And one of the interesting developments in evangelical Christianity is a movement toward environmentalism, a movement toward working against Poverty and so on. And part of the reason for that is that they know people in their church who work hard, who are honest, decent people and are not making a living because. Because of the nature of this economy, they see this, they care about these people, and their political views are changing.

A question I had is, who gets to do the framing? I mean, you've talked about the political candidates like they get to do it. But my question really is, what can we do to help this along?

Several things. First of all, everybody who has an instinct about what's right and what's wrong already is doing the framing unconsciously. If you hear a new case of something and you say, that's terrible or that's wonderful, that means you already have the moral views and the political views unconsciously there. Our job is to make the unconscious conscious, to bring them up and to give language to them. Now, everybody has this responsibility. Our job is to show you how to show people how to do this, to give people examples so that everybody can do it. Our job is the democratization of knowledge. You know, we do or we do. We take whatever expertise we have and we show how it works. But the idea is for everybody to get the idea of how it works and be able to do it themselves. Oh, well, mine's an extension of that. It is. Do you have any specific methodologies for how. How to make the unconscious reflex more conscious for individuals or groups of people? Yeah, the method. Well, first of all, there are two things. There's a set of methodologies that you learn in the classes I teach and so on. In the. In cognitive linguistics, there are a whole bunch of them. One of them is to look at the way people reason, to look at discourses, and to ask what makes them make sense. You know, to assume everybody who's arguing. For example, if you have a political argument, it starts from a moral premise. Why? Because you assume you're right. In order to be right, it's got to be moral. Nobody says, you know, this is. I have an immoral proposal. Here it is, you know, it's supposed to be right. And so the question is, what makes it right? What exactly premises, what moral premises, what political premises, what assumptions about the economy, et cetera, make this make sense? And then you do this for hundreds of cases, and you get to do it instantly. After a while, that is, when you teach this and you show people that there's a system behind it. There's a system of thought that works in general for strict versus nurturing forms of thought. In a while, people get it. And our job is to get this out there enough and then to train people who can train other people to be able to do that. So, yes, that's one of the methodologies. There are other methodologies. One, you can look at language and look at the range in which a word is used and how it works and what its framing is. There are, you know, lots of techniques for studying the framing of words, but you don't have to become a professional to do this. Our idea is to give people enough of the examples to allow them to understand that they have an unconscious reasoning and how it generally works so that they can begin to see it for themselves. And we see this all the time. We have an interactive website called Rockridge Nation, which where people write in their problems and we answer them as well as we can. But people also send in their solutions and we discuss them, or they discuss them with each other. And after a while, what we find is that people get the idea. And what we want to do is democratize that kind of knowledge to get as many people as possible being able to do it for themselves. Thanks.